We have more news and more influential journalism, across an unprecedented range of media, than ever before. Yet journalism is under constant attack from politicians, philosophers and the general public. “The future for the press in the new millennium looks bleak,” says Dr Carl Jensen, founder of Project Censored, which has been tracking press issues in the US for 28 years:
“The press has the power to stimulate people to clean up the environment, prevent nuclear proliferation, force crooked politicians out of office… and even to save the lives of millions of people as it did in Ethiopia in 1984. But instead, we are using it to promote sex, violence, and sensationalism and to line the pockets of already wealthy media moguls.”
But as Ian Hargreaves, former editor of the Independent and author of Journalism: a very short introduction, points out, “I’ve never known a time when people were not saying that journalism is in some kind of crisis”. Journalism has always been under attack, “the more ferocious the attack, the healthier journalism must be”. Journalists are the first to admit the flaws in their own profession: Nicolas Tomalin, a star reporter for the Sunday Times, who was killed in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, advised aspiring reporters that “the only qualities essential for real success in journalism are ratlike cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability.”
Andrew Marr, in My Trade, blames journalism’s problems on issues of trust, reluctance to correct stories and problems of tone and emotionalism: “The idea of news has altered. It stopped being essentially information and became something designed to produce – at all costs, always – an emotional reaction.” Professor Justin Lewis, head of Cardiff’s Journalism School, gave an example of this trend in his analysis of news hooks between 2000 and 2008: use of the ‘terrorism’ hook was at its peak in 2002, at which point more than half of all news stories where based upon it, whilst religious and cultural issues are now dominating at 33%. Common sense dictates that this cannot and is not a true reflexion of the world today; it is nothing but hype and misplaced priorities.
This trend has led to decreasing levels of trust in those entrusted as our cultural gatekeepers. Charles Reiss, former political editor of the Evening Standard, is clear on the causes of this decline:
“I am not going to throw figures at you. I will simply point to the fairly remorseless decline in circulation over the last couple of years. And of course, that is almost certainly in part due to the internet and the rise in citizen journalism. But the fact that your readers don’t believe more than one word in 10 of what they read – of what you write – is hardly a major circulation booster, is it?”
Journalists have not done a lot to help their own cause. As Ian Hargreaves argues, the uproar surrounding Sachsgate and Clinton’s Zippergate has cast an unfortunate shadow over serious journalism: “The very fact that journalists all over the world so casually add the suffix ‘gate’ to any potential scandal, however trivial, itself indicates a certain loss of seriousness since the days of Watergate.”
The digital revolution radically changed the ways in which people consume news. Andrew Keen describes it as “the cult of the amateur”:
“Old media is facing extinction… the monkeys take over. Say good-bye to today’s experts and cultural gatekeepers… In today’s cult of the amateur, the monkeys are running the show. With their infinite typewriters they are authoring the future. And we may not like how it reads.”
He believes that the rise of user generated content is killing our culture and economy. But to an aspiring journalist, this smacks of nostalgia, almost rose-tinted in its view of my profession.
In January 1998, Hollywood-based blogger Matt Drudge had the American news media at his feet when he learned that Newsweek Magazine, owned by the Washington Post group, had held back from revealing President Clinton’s sexual liaison with now infamous White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. Drudge, got confirmation of the story, wrote his report, and sent it out to his readers. The scoop became legendary:
“Every citizen can be a reporter; can take on the powers that be. The Net gives as much voice to a 13-year-old computer geek like me as to a CEO or Speaker of the House. We all become equal.”
He likened the high-speed, error-prone editions of online journalism to the heyday of the yellow press, when newspapers would turn out several editions a day. The only problem Drudge could see was that if there were thousands of reporters like him clamouring for attention, “it could start looking like an insane asylum”.
Professor Stewart Purvis from City University views the digital revolution as a means of making journalism more accessible, “rather than dumbing down, there’s a sector of the market in television and print that has smartened up in order to appeal to those post-war generation that got access to higher education for the first time in their family’s history”. This argument inevitably leads to talk to the lack of quality and good journalism: because there is so much of it and it is mostly available without payment, we find it difficult to sort the good from the bad.
But as Charlie Beckett, of SuperMedia, points out: “[Journalism] is the art of the possible, not a profession for perfectionists”. There is no real proof of a decline in good journalism and as news organizations invest in online services, I would argue that it provides more. In the words of Ian Hargreaves, “no professional communicator should doubt the power of the internet in the hands of the curious and determined citizen.”
As the foremost cited communications scholar in the world, Manuel Castells, argues: the internet is “to be discovered by experience, not proclaimed beforehand…it is the expression of ourselves”. Tom Rosenstiel, founder of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, believes that the digital revolution will ultimately save journalism:
“[It] create[s] the capacity for ten young people in a garage to invent a journalism that flows out of the needs of the people they know, the communities they want to serve, rather than some sophisticated model from business consultants about how to maximise profitability. The first journalism in the 1600s was literally conversation among citizens in coffee houses in England. The internet is our new coffee house.”
As a student journalist, this is a prospect to be savoured. Journalism is changing and I can have some say, however small, in its future. As Cardiff’s Professor of PR, Simon Lewis, points out, without the 3million internet donors, many of whom gave less than $100 each, and the 2million Facebook supporters by the time the American Presidential campaign started, we would never have seen a relatively unknown African-American elected as President.
To quote Andrew Marr, “Tomorrow’s reporters will have chaotic but interesting lives. Journalism will mess with their relationships, keep them poorer and less secure than they might be elsewhere, and give them an obscure and secret buzz no one outside the trade will ever really understand. But if they do it well, they will be central to the health of the people.”
This is an exciting era for all young journalists and I feel very privileged to be a part of it.
